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Savić Viktor, The Serbian Manuscripts in the Corpus of Slavic Manuscripts at Saint Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai (11th–12th Centuries
Saint Catherine’s monastery on Mount Sinai holds a collection of about 4,500 ancient manuscripts in various languages, including more than 80 Slavic manuscripts. Half of the Slavic manuscripts were discovered in 1975, in the crypt of the church of Saint George in the monastery walls. Particularly important is the discovery of the Glagolitic manuscripts which added helped complete two previously known Glagolitic manuscripts (Euchologion 1/N – 37/O and Psalter 2/N – 38/O) and, even more so, the discovery of the previously unknown, somewhat later, Psalter (3/N), Menaion (4/N) and Missal/Euchologion (5/N). An unsigned Horologion from an earlier period was later added to this group. The paper discusses each individual manuscript, along with other written monuments from the studied period (not all of which are held in the monastery, but rather in major international manuscript collections), and Russian Cyrillic manuscripts have a prominent place among them. The Serbian literacy of the time was embedded in the Old Church Slavonic literacy as shaped in the Ohrid Archbishopric (along with Greek), and the presence of Serbian scribes can be established based only on deviations (mostly errors), from the accepted orthographic and linguistic canon. The earliest Slavic manuscripts found on Mount Sinai are associated with the literacy of the South Slavic hermits active in the central area of the Byzantine Ohrid Archbishopric, in the contact zone among today’s Serbia, North Macedonia and Bulgaria (10th–12th centuries). The line of South Slavic literacy which was shaped into an independent Serbian recension (written monuments of the 12th and early 13th centuries) through the filter of the Serbian, Prizren – South Morava dialect originates directly from this area. Accordingly, the Serbian liturgical Glagolitic literacy of the 11th–12th centuries had the same roots as the other lines of Slavic literacy present on Mount Sinai in the same period. Although Serbian written monuments from the area where Serbian literacy took shape are scarce, we can largely reconstruct it thanks to remnants found on Mount Sinai.
